


The Ice Age

by Balder12



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Hurt Sam Winchester, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Episode: s09e09 Holy Terror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-19
Updated: 2014-03-19
Packaged: 2018-01-16 06:41:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1335802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Balder12/pseuds/Balder12
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam doesn't know what the man in the trench coat wants.  All he knows is the man is very insistent, and the ice is getting closer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Ice Age

**Author's Note:**

> Purchased by [irradiant](http://irradiant.livejournal.com/) for the [Fandom Auction](http://fandomaid.livejournal.com/). Thanks so much for your donation! I hope you enjoy your belated story.
> 
> Many thanks to [septembers-coda](http://septembers-coda.livejournal.com/) for a swift and excellent beta.
> 
> The gorgeous art and dividers were created by [BeeLikeJ](http://archiveofourown.org/users/BeeLikeJ).

 

The sky has the artistic, premeditated layers of an expensive cocktail. The ruddy sun drops through it like a maraschino cherry and sinks into the center of the Pacific Ocean.

Sam loves the view from his balcony. He comes out here to watch the sunset every day. He wasn’t always so lucky. There was a time when he had no home. There was a time when his home had no windows. But every time his thoughts turn toward the darkness of his past they stutter and stop, only to loop around and bring him back to the present moment. Now is good. It’s useless to dwell on what’s done.

By day Sam walks along the stony beach by his house and collects the intricate shells that wash ashore, or else lies on a blanket in the sand and reads his ragged paperbacks, the pages fat and swollen from the damp sea air. Sometimes he drives to the farmers’ market and shops for fresh vegetables. The light across the stalls is slanted and golden, like the light that falls through cathedral windows. He never remembers the faces of the people who sold him his apples. In the evenings he cooks for one in his stainless steel kitchen, untroubled by his solitude. His family is just away for a while. His mind redirects itself before he can wonder who they are or where they went.

The knock catches Sam off guard. No one has ever knocked before. He sets down his glass of wine on the edge of the balcony and walks through the living room, filled with inexplicable dread. When he opens the front door he’s confronted with a man in a trench coat standing stiffly on his porch. The man is solemn-faced and uneasy. He looks for all the world like a detective from an old movie. Sam can’t place him, but he’s seen him before.

“Agent,” Sam says with a grin. He can’t explain why it’s funny. He just knows it feels like the continuation of a game they played long ago.

“Sam,” says the man. “I’m sorry it took me so long to find you.” He sounds desperate. Sam doesn’t understand what he’s talking about. Sam hasn’t been hiding from anyone.

“Come in,” Sam says. He’s never felt lonely before, but he can’t remember the last time he talked to another person. Now that one has come to see him his heart hurts at the thought of letting him go.

The man steps inside, and his eyes dart uneasily around the white beams and gleaming glass walls of Sam’s home. “I don’t know how long we have,” the man says. “I want to help, but you’re the one who has to do it.”

The words mean nothing. “I think maybe you have the wrong house,” Sam says reluctantly. He still doesn’t want the man to leave. “But I can help you find who you’re looking for. I’ll make us dinner if you have time.” Sam has nothing to offer but fresh vegetables, old books, and seashells. He hopes the man will be interested in one of them.

The man stares at Sam. “You don’t remember?” he says finally.

“I’m sorry,” Sam says. “I feel like we’ve met, but . . .”

The man looks back at the front door abruptly, as if he’s heard a noise. “I have to go, but I’ll come back when I can. You need to fight this.” And then he’s gone as if he’d never been there. Perhaps he hadn’t. How very strange. Curiosity flickers in Sam’s consciousness, but the spark doesn’t catch. He walks back out to the balcony and the sun resumes setting, but its beauty no longer interests him. He feels sad and he doesn’t know why.

A rime of frost has formed along the wrought-iron railing while he was inside. He lifts the wine to his lips only to find the surface covered by a thin plate of ice. The nights are getting colder.

The afternoon sun gleams off the water like gold plating, but the breeze from the ocean makes Sam’s bones ache with cold. He draws his coat close as he walks along the beach. He picks up the shells he finds underfoot, brushing away the ice crystals that have formed inside their curves. He tries to imagine what strange creatures once lived inside them.

“Sam.” The man in the trench coat is standing next to him.

“You came back,” Sam says. He didn’t know how much he’d wanted that until it happened.

The man grabs his wrist. “You have to free yourself. I can’t do it for you.”

Sam looks at where they’re touching and gently removes the man’s fingers. “I don’t know what you mean. I want to help you. If you would just explain . . .” The sun is bright along the edge of the shell in Sam’s hand, and he watches it glitter in the pearly depths. He has the sense he and the man have been here for ages. The light is timeless.

The man grabs him by the lapels of his jacket and shakes him. “Wake up! You need to wake up.”

Sam pulls away from him, confused. “I _am_ awake. Why don’t we go back to the house? We can talk about it there. You can tell me what you want.”

The man lifts his eyes to the pretty, china-blue sky as if he’s looking for help. He clenches and unclenches his fists. “All right,” he says. “The house.”

The man stands squarely in the middle of Sam’s kitchen while Sam chops up vegetables for a salad. He looks as straight-backed as a soldier and as out-of-place as a ghost.

“You have a brother,” the man says after a long silence. “What’s his name?”

Sam flinches and the knife slices into his thumb instead of the bell pepper. A drop of blood falls on the white tile floor. It’s the only unclean thing in the whole pristine house.

Sam opens his mouth to answer but nothing comes out. The man watches him struggle for a moment before he speaks again. “Surely you should know your brother’s name. Why don’t you?” Sam strains to get to his memories through the dark, sticky weight layered over his mind, but nothing rises to the surface. For an instant he feels the cold edge of panic, but then the calm seeps back into him and takes control.

“I don’t know,” Sam says. He feels confused and half-drunk, although he’s had nothing to drink. “It’s not important, is it? He’ll be home soon. You can wait for him here if you want.”

The man sinks down into a chair at the kitchen table and rests his head on his hand. “I don’t know what to do, Sam. I just don’t know.” He sounds so tired, so sad.

Sam walks over and lays a hand on his shoulder. “It’ll be all right. Whatever’s wrong, we’ll figure it out together.” But the man doesn’t seem reassured.

Sam suddenly remembers the bottle of whiskey tucked in the back of one of the cabinets, and goes to get it. The man seems like he needs it. Sam pours a couple of fingers into a glass, but when he turns around the kitchen is empty. He wants to call the man’s name, but he doesn’t know it. Sam stands there for a while, glass in hand, waiting for the man to return. Nothing happens.

Finally he carries the whiskey out to the balcony and drinks it himself. It tastes like the red glow of pain and the musty oppression of confined spaces. It tastes like home.

The bougainvillea along the railing has frozen in full bloom. Sam pulls off one of the flowers and studies it, each petal perfectly preserved in the ice. The cold burns his palm, but the ice doesn’t melt.

The man returns. He eats the glossy red strawberries Sam gives him when he appears at breakfast; he drinks the glittering wine Sam pours him when he shows up at night. He walks with Sam on the beach and accepts the interesting shells Sam finds. Occasionally he even smiles at Sam’s small gifts, and Sam clings to those memories, afraid they’ll dissolve into oblivion like the rest of his past.

Sometimes the man is angry. He berates Sam in the grandiose language of a revival tent preacher, and once or twice grabs him so hard he lifts him right off the ground. These outbursts are rare, and they trouble Sam less than the man’s long silences. He watches Sam by the hour, his gaze like a microscope searching out every sin Sam’s ever committed. These are the only times Sam ever wishes for the man to leave. At the end of these terrible intervals the man stirs as if waking, seeming newly lost and sad. Sam can tell he’s disappointing the man, but he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do about it.

It keeps getting colder. The warm afternoon rains that used to fall across the beach stop, replaced by fat, soft snowflakes that turn the yellow sand powdered-sugar white. Snow catches in Sam’s hair and eyelashes when he takes his walks. It settles on the man’s coat and sits without melting, the way it would on the shoulders of a statue.

Sam builds fires in the living room hearth. The weather is too bitter to allow for trips into town, but the supply of firewood never dwindles. The ruddy firelight suggests wholesome warmth, but it’s as cold as flames on a TV screen. The man stands off to the side and watches while Sam tries in vain to warm his blue fingers.

Sam wakes to the rustle of the man’s coat and sees his silhouette seated in the open window, gazing out.

“What are you looking at?” Sam says. Some small part of him knows it’s strange for the man to be in his bedroom in the middle of the night, but the thought is swallowed up by the heavy calm that weighs down his thoughts.

“The ice,” the man says.

Sam gets out of bed and joins him, sitting on the opposite side of the window frame. The moonlight glints off the jagged peaks and breaking foam of the Pacific, but the ocean is utterly still. Sam blinks. It’s frozen solid. It glitters beneath them like an infinite plane of crystal.

“It’s beautiful,” Sam says.

The man turns toward him. “When it reaches you you’ll die.” Sam knows he should feel something, but his chest is still and hollow. “Oh,” he says.

The man studies him, waiting for a reaction. When none comes he sighs and bows his head, like he’s feeling the grief Sam can’t. “I’ve failed you. I don’t know what more I can do.” Sam wraps a consoling arm around him, and to his surprise the man allows it, coming to rest against his side. The man feels warm, even through his trench coat. He’s the only thing in the house that gives off real heat.

“It’ll be all right,” Sam says, because those seem like the words he’s supposed to say. He feels nothing about the ocean of ice below them, but he’s sad to have caused his friend pain. The man doesn’t answer. He just leans into Sam and gazes out at what’s coming.

The ice accumulates in delicate patterns along the inside of the windows, closing off Sam’s view of the world. It grows silently across picture frames and the backs of chairs. The front door freezes shut, the bolts immovably stuck.

Sam lies on the couch and watches the feathers of frost advance gradually across the coffee table. When he stretches his arm, a stalagmite of ice connecting his sleeve to the floor snaps with a sharp crack. He shifts his feet experimentally and hears the crunch of breaking ice. Soon it’ll cover him over while he sleeps.

He sits up wearily, and looks over at where the man sits in stoic silence. Icicles have formed along the hem of his coat. Sam reaches across the table and snaps them off. The ice will cover the man too. The first inkling of concern flutters in Sam’s consciousness.

“You should probably go,” Sam says. He doesn’t want to face the end alone, but he also doesn’t want the man to die. “You can still leave, can’t you?” The doors don’t open anymore, but the man has never needed doors to disappear.

“No,” the man says. “I’m not leaving. If I can’t save you, at least I’ll stay with you until the end.”

Sam feels the urge to stop talking, to lie down on the couch again and rest in silence. It sits on his mind like a lead weight. He pushes back against it. This matters in a way nothing else has in his time at the house.

“But if you stay here, you’ll die?” Sam feels this must be true. The ice is relentless.

“Perhaps,” the man says. He’s calm with the flatness of despair. “I left you once where I never should have. I won’t do it again.”

“I don’t remember that,” Sam says. Frustration spreads its warmth in his chest. “Who are you? What . . . ?” The words come slowly, percolating up into his consciousness. “You come here, and you watch me, but you’ve never told me what you want. What is it I didn’t do? How was I supposed to save you?”

The man covers his face with his hands for an instant, and then composes himself. “I _have_ told you, Sam. Three thousand, six hundred and thirty-eight times. I told you at the beginning of this conversation. You never hear me, no matter how hard I try or what tricks I resort to.”

Sam stands up, frost sloughing off his legs. “That’s not true,” he says, and he desperately needs to believe it. “It’s not, and I . . .” he struggles to remember what the man has said to him during their long walks on the beach and quiet meals in the kitchen, but nothing presents itself. He remembers the comforting solidity of the man’s presence, but the words that shaped their conversations are lost to him among the soft chaos of seashells, wine, and strawberries.

“Tell me again,” Sam insists. The man has been his only friend in this peculiar exile. Sam won’t let him die so easily.

The man looks up with a flash of curiosity that quickly fades into blankness. “No,” he says. “There’s no point.”

“Then go!” Sam is suddenly aware of how little he understands about his own life. He doesn’t know how he came to this house, or why he was alone, or what brought the ice to swallow him up. All he knows is this man had foreseen the end, and tried his best to prevent it.

“No.” The man is quiet and immovable. Sam feels the urge to plead, to say it’s fine, really, he hardly even minds the cold, but he senses it would make no difference.

“Get up,” Sam says. The man looks at him. He seems surprised. “Get. Up.”

The man obeys. Sam roughly brushes away the frost that’s accumulated along the man’s arms, and shakes loose the little icicles lining his coat. It accomplishes nothing—the ice will grow back again as soon as the man sits down—but Sam feels a surge of power all the same.

“What else?” he says. “What do I need to do?” The man just stares at him. It’s not a look of judgment now, if it ever was. It’s flat, alien blankness. Sam wants to grab him and shake him, the way the man’s done to him so many times, but instead he walks to the door.

“Do I need to open it for you? Is that it?” Sam rattles the door and it creaks in its frozen frame. “You need to go.” No response. Sam flushes with anger. “You’re not welcome here anymore.”

But the words are meaningless as long as they’re both locked inside. Maybe it’s already too late to save the man. Sam braces himself against the wall and pulls as hard as he can on the doorknob. There’s a long series of cracks and pops from inside the wood, but it doesn’t give. He scrapes the ice away from the edges and works his short fingernails between the door and the frame, trying to pry it open. One of his nails bends back and snaps under the pressure. Blood dapples the frost that’s already started to grow back over the exposed seams.

Sam starts to put his finger in his mouth, but an unplaceable memory of blood on his tongue, coppery and dangerous, stops him halfway through the gesture. He stares at the ruined nail as it drips slowly on the floor. The blood sits in beads on the ice, looking hopelessly out of place.

Sam holds up his hand. A thin line of blood trickles across his palm. “This is my blood,” he says. It feels like a revelation. The person who has this vital, gory mess inside him could never build this beautiful, lifeless husk. “This isn’t my house.” The man doesn’t answer, but that no longer feels necessary. “This isn’t _my_ house,” he repeats, with more conviction this time.

“I’ll get you out,” Sam says. The front door, already scratched and bloodstained, is clearly no good. He walks across the room to the sliding glass doors that lead out to the balcony. The house is set into a hill, so the balcony is a floor above the ground, but it’s a drop onto sand. The man could make the jump if he had to. They both could.

Sam pulls the door toward him, his bloody finger leaving an ugly streak of red across the ice flowers on the glass, but it doesn’t give. He stares at the intricate patterns of frost that stand between him and freedom, and makes a decision. He pulls off his overshirt, wraps it around his fist, and punches the door. The glass cracks with a dull crunch. Sam hits it again and it starts to disintegrate. He pulls at it with his bare hand and the shards cut into his skin as he breaks away the ice and glass in ragged chunks. Blood stains the wall where he’s leaned against it for leverage, and he feels it give beneath his touch. He digs his fingers into the concrete and it turns to rotten ice and falls away.

The wall melts downward into slush under the heat of his blood. Snow blows in through the gaps. The remaining bricks groan as the frame of the house warps and slides out of its foundation.

“Run!” Sam says, gesturing to the raw wound he’s created in the house. The man grabs him by the shoulder and pulls him toward blinding nothingness outside. Sam follows, tearing his clothes on the broken glass as he falls over the edge of the balcony and lands painfully on the snowdrifts below. He’s instantly back on his feet, clutching the man’s trench coat and stumbling forward. He has no real desire to keep fighting, but he knows the man won’t leave unless Sam leads him out.

It’s snowing so hard he can’t see his hand in front of his face. Every breath is a stab of razor-sharp cold that doubles him over until it overwhelms him. He falls to the ground and his chest burns like it’s filled with ice. The pain pulls tight into an agonizing knot, and he coughs until he forces it up into his throat. He chokes for an unbearable age, unable to spit it out or swallow it down, until it pushes its way out of his mouth in a flash of pain so brilliant he’s sure it’s death.

Sam’s eyes throb in the multicolored darkness behind his eyelids. He opens them reluctantly, wincing at the light, and finds himself staring at concrete. It’s cold under his cheek. He tries to sit up, but his arms give out and he sinks back down to the floor.

A warm hand brushes aside his hair and rests on the back of his neck. Sam tips his head as far as he can without moving anything else, and sees the man sitting next to him.

“Cas.” The syllable is little more than a croak. He swallows and tries again. “Castiel. I remember you now.”

“Good,” Cas says. “Do you know what happened?”

Sam has a brother named Dean, a mother who burned on the ceiling, and a father who went to hell. He’s died more times than he cares to count. He was the devil for a while, but he’s better now. He has no idea why he’s lying on a concrete floor.

“No.”

“You were possessed by a fallen angel. I entered your mind and helped you force him out.”

“What? How?” Sam tries to sit up again and this time he makes it. He looks around. They seem to be in an abandoned warehouse. The last thing he remembers clearly is the three of them going out for a beer. After that it’s a jumble of snow and sand, strawberries and blood. “Where’s Dean?”

“He’s fine. We split up, and there was no time to call him once I found you.” Cas looks away. It’s such a mundanely human gesture of discomfort. Sam can remember when Cas was utterly unreadable.

“How did this happen?” Sam says again. He can’t imagine anything that would move him to hand his body over to an angel. “What did I do? What kind of deal did I make?”

“After the trials, you collapsed. You were dying. There was no other way to save you and Dean felt . . . you were tricked. I didn’t know either until Gadreel stole you entirely.”

“Dean . . . ?” Sam doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t have words yet for what Dean did. “Since the church?”

Cas nods.  So many months with that creature curled up inside him. He should probably have an opinion about that, but all he feels is a dull ache in his chest when he breathes, as if his lungs are frostbitten.

“You must be angry,” Cas says, and if Sam didn’t know better he’d swear he sounded hopeful.

“I don’t know what I am.” He feels like an empty shell, scrubbed out and left behind.

Cas rises and holds out his hand. “You can talk to him about it when he gets here tomorrow. Right now you should rest.” Sam takes his hand only as a gesture of friendship, but halfway to his feet he realizes he needs it, and by the time he manages to stand he’s leaning most of his weight against Cas’s side. Cas wraps an arm around him and shuffles him step by painful step out the door. On the far side of a fallen chain link fence the sun is rising flat and gray over a vacant lot. The air smells like snow.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt: Cas tries to get Sam to reject Gadreel by talking to him in his mind/subconscious/dreams.


End file.
